Simple
by Searching-For-My-Reason
Summary: Buffy, Spike, a photo, and a few simple words.


Simple

**Victim #1**

Spike was lying in his crypt; silently contemplating everything that had happened to him since he stepped foot in Sunnydale. Since the first time he ever saw her.

His Slayer. His Buffy.

They started with hating each other, fighting fists and fangs, with neither the victor nor the loser. Then they became reluctant allies in the fight against the Hellmouth. Eventually, their tumultuous relationship took the next logical step; fucking each other.

The love of his unlife was his only weakness. After all they had been through, He had almost lost her.

There was a time Spike hated Buffy for the feelings she inspired in his long-dead heart but not anymore. She brought him back to life. So what if he didn't have a heart that beat within the confines of his chest.

She _**was**_ his heartbeat.

.When she died for the first time, he really was one of the undead. He had few actual thoughts besides the longing to follow her into death. He kept himself from doing that. No. He couldn't. Not until her final wish was fulfilled. No matter how much he yearned to find the peace that only came with death he wouldn't. He made a promise to a lady; one that could only be broken by death.

He had to protect the Bit. "Till the end of the world"

With the help of her misguided friends, Buffy was back. However, she was…different. She was much darker these days. He still loved her of course, always would.

The darkness in her had her driven to place she couldn't escape. A place she struggled to claw out of, never succeeding, only falling deeper.

A place she hated more than him. A place filled with pain, anger and torment. She took it out on him. As always.

Her favourite game had always been "Kick-the-Spike;" why should now be any different?

She beat him; she fucked him, giving him a false sense of paradise; only to beat him again. She used his body to make her feel, then discarded him in a flurry of insults and flying fists, leaving him in the proverbial dust.

Spike wouldn't leave her though, because he knew that no matter how much she denied it.

Buffy needed him.

There was a period of time right after she came back that they were almost friends. Talking and laughing, and she would cry on his shoulder. It broke his heart to see the pain she was in so of course. If hurting him helped heal her. He wouldn't stop her. He would continue to ask her to stay of course, openly hoping that one of these times she would want to stay. She would allow herself to fall asleep in his arms, to wallow in the sweet remembrance of their passion.

To love him back.

He continued to hope.

He always will.

**Victim #2**

Buffy was lying in her bed; thinking of none other than him of course. She could never get him off her mind. She remembered the first time she ever saw him. She could remember thinking to herself _"Damn, how come the hot ones are always bad."_

That was a long time ago, a life time ago. Back when she was _pure_; she thought sadly. Before she had passed on to heaven and then returned to the world that was her hell.

All she could think was that it had happened for one specific reason. She wasn't worthy.

She figured she was cast away, which in her mind meant she must be impure, disgusting, evil, unholy.

She was everything she had ever fought against rolled into one Buffy-labelled package.

She returned from Spike's crypt a few hours earlier. His unique scent lingered on her skin. If he ever wondered she would tell him the second she got home she scrubbed till her body was raw to get his disgusting smell off of her. In reality; she would lay still for hours breathing it in. Here in her room she could tell herself the truth. About _that_ anyway.

Everything else she would push into the back of her mind. She heard a slight scratching noise and rolled over to look at her door. There it was. The door. Closed.

Then she noticed a small while piece of paper on the floor. Walking up to it she noticed it was a picture turned over. She flipped it and was taken aback. Suddenly everything fell to place.

Ever since she returned she didn't _**see**_ Spike, he was just always…there. She didn't see his gentle face; the sea of sapphires that was his eyes, or the shock of white blonde that was his hair.

She ran out of the house, hoping with all she was that she wasn't too late.

Left behind on the floor in her room was an upturned photo taken sometime during the period of time she was dead. It was a photo of Spike and Dawn, laying on her couch in the living room and Dawn was asleep. She was curled up to Spike who was just waking up. His eyes were just barely cracked but his hair was tussled and the pure blue light shinning from his cerulean orbs seem to dominate the picture. The flash had created an explosive effect. She could see everything through that picture.

His sadness.

His loneliness.

Herself.

She knew it seemed impossible since she was dead. But there in his gaze was herself.

Out of the rain.

Spike had moved to the top level of his crypt, he was sitting in his favourite chair. The echoes of the rain pelting down on the roof of the crypt let Spike know the storm was a doozy. He tried to pity anyone stupid enough to be out in it but couldn't muster the emotion; he was too lost in his thoughts of Buffy to care.

The door to his crypt banged open, and there stood the subject of his thoughts, dripping wet at his door with red eyes and barely visible tear tracts through the rain. She spoke loudly. Willing him to hear everything she wanted to say through three simple words.

"Spike, I'm Sorry."


End file.
